Advances in three-dimensional (3D) scanning and acquisition techniques have given rise to the increases of volumetric digital shape models in physics simulation. Traditional shape representation (e.g., triangle mesh) and simulation methods are incapable of real-time simulation. This drawback overshadows many potential applications, especially high performance real-time interactive requirements on ever growing high resolution complex simulation scenarios for usages, such as mobile gaming, remote surgery, 3D navigation, 3D digital cameras and printing, 3D-user interfaces (UI), mobile virtual reality, 3D shape web searching, etc. Additionally, current mobile platforms, such as smart-phones, are assembled with limited: computation ability, storage and transmission capability.
In conventional mobile device architecture, shape representation mainly focuses on allowing more shape complexity during designing models. The focus on shape complexity determines that discrete/irregular models, such as point cloud and triangle mesh, are widely used because of their high flexibility for representing complex shapes. This modeling standard causes severe storage, transmission and numerical computing obstacles. For example, a game designer creates a mid-size/resolution surface model (e.g., with 5122×6 vertices within 6 faces) in the physics-based simulation engine. Therefore conversion to a volumetric model (5123 vertices) is required. Thus, a model's vertex number increases to a higher order of magnitude. The increase in data is intolerable during practice, especially on mobile devices with limited resources. Not only is the intolerance due to the pressure from limited storage, but mainly because this data explosion brings out unrealistic need of increased numerical computation ability and transmission bandwidth.
Currently the Internet bandwidth download/upload average is about 104 kb/s. A real-time simulation typically requires at least 50 frames per second. Thus, transmission of only 2000 bits is available for updating one frame. This bandwidth limitation severely hampers simultaneous transmission for a large number of models.